Would you support a candidate who says the TSA intentionally allows gay agents to fondle children?

Or one who suspects China made Google rig its search results so people couldn't find him online?

Of course you wouldn't.

But that's exactly what more than 704,708 Tennesseans did Tuesday when they chose Mark Clayton, the Democratic nominee beaten soundly by the GOP incumbent, U.S. Sen. Bob Corker.

Clayton may be, according to The Washington Post, "2012's worst candidate."

He's also a cautionary tale for party loyalists and an embarrassment to the Tennessee Democratic Party, which shirked its duty to remind voters that Clayton is a quack.

Party leadership knew Clayton, a part-time flooring installer from Whites Creek, is a conspiracy theorist and virulently opposed to gay marriage. But he won the August party primary, thanks to a name first on the alphabetic ballot.

Once Clayton, who has never held office, had the nomination, the party disavowed him and concentrated on winnable races, said party chairman Chip Forrester.

And it outsourced its role as the town crier for all things liberal.

"Our expectation was that all the press that it had gotten, all the media attention after the nomination, if you were a Democrat and were not aware that we had disavowed him, I'm not sure what newspaper or TV station you were watching," Forrester said.

"The Democratic Party is substantially outspent by Republican money, so we have to make a decision where to allocate very limited dollars," Forrester said, noting that in Corker's 2006 race, he raised more than $13 million and gave his campaign $2 million more.

Party volunteers could have mounted a free-ish anti-Clayton campaign using social media, but they didn't. Recent warnings about Clayton were absent from the party's website, Twitter account or Facebook page.

Wasn't it the party's job to give Democrats their marching orders: Write in Big Bird if you want, but don't vote for Clayton?

Not necessarily, asserted Forrester, who wrote in actor Ashley Judd, a faithful Democrat.

"There's another way of looking at it — voters have a responsibility to educate themselves about candidates," said Forrester, who isn't seeking a third term as chairman.

"Obviously, people did not do their homework."

Good try, but that (yellow) dog won't hunt.

"That's a good way for him to try to pin the blame on someone else, but he's the head of the party, and the bucks stops there," said Susan Adler Thorp, a political consultant and former political columnist for The Commercial Appeal.

"In politics, you can't assume that someone else knows something."

At the January meeting, the party's bylaws committee will present a plan to better vet primary nominees, in the hopes of preventing another Clayton catastrophe, Forrester said.

That won't be enough, Thorp said.

"The Tennessee Democratic Party has been on the road to irrelevance to for at least for the last 15 years," she said.

Tuesday's election gave the GOP supermajorities in the state Legislature, which makes the other side moot.

"The elected (state) Democrats don't need to attend meetings, because they have a quorum without them," Thorp said.

The party's mistake is exacerbated by the blind party allegiance by voters who surely wouldn't have chosen Clayton if they'd known what he stands for.

"They just opened the ballot and saw the letter D and mistook it for the word Democrat and they should have read it as dumb," Thorp said.